My Oxford Year

“All right.”

“Bring your Scotch.”

The girl rolls her eyes, but just then, Professor Roberta Styan walks in. Everything stops. She typifies the absentminded professor, stumbling up to the lectern, arms overflowing with paraphernalia. Briefcase, papers, umbrella, jacket, muttering as she walks, “Hello, hello, sorry, apologies for the delay.”

At the podium, she doesn’t set anything down, just stands behind it looking out at us. Then she says, “Right, so: tragic news, I’m afraid. I’ve just been named head of graduate studies. Which means I’m far too important to be teaching you lot.” Before we can respond, she continues, “Please, shed no tears! Rend not your garments! My replacement is more than able. In fact, he’s my most brilliant JRF. After two minutes with him—not to mention his skinny jeans—you’ll forget I ever existed.” She takes a breath, then smiles. Off our lack of reaction, she quips, “You were meant to scoff at that. Ah well. Without further ado, meet Jamie Davenport. Jamie?” She gestures toward the door.

Wait. Hold on. The person I came to Oxford to study with is leaving? But I’ve read all of her books, all of her papers. I watched all three of her YouTube videos. (It’s not her fault. Victorian sexuality and linguistics is a niche market.) This isn’t happening. She was my Oxford destiny, my Gandalf, my Mr. Miyagi, my whatever-Robin-Williams’s-Character’s-Name-Was-in-DeadPoets-Society. What does she mean she’s not teaching?

Styan hobbles away from the podium, and the TA gives her a squeeze on the shoulder before taking the lectern. “Sorry to disappoint, my skinny jeans are at the cleaners.” He smiles charmingly at the group and everyone responds with an appreciative chuckle.

Except for me. I can’t respond. I’m too busy having my world reordered.

The new professor is the posh prat.

CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_20f2e808-6cea-53c6-b0c4-24ce840dc6f7)

Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror cracked from side to side;

“The curse is come upon me,” cried

The Lady of Shalott.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalott,” 1831–1832

Jamie Davenport takes his time spreading his notes out on the podium. Then he looks up at the class and smiles impishly. “Please, be gentle.”

What would happen if I left? This is only one of my courses and it only meets once a week. Maybe I can join another group. Maybe I can track down Styan and convince her to work with me privately. I refuse to allow this teaching assistant to be my only option. This cannot be my “Once-in-a-Lifetime Experience.” That’s supposed to be a good thing.

“Five years ago,” he begins, “I sat right where you are now. Styan walked in and I thought, ‘So this is who’ll bore me to tears for the next two months?’ I mean, I love poetry—why else would I be here, eh?—but bloody Victorian? Could anything be worse? Ghastly old men in top hats, big bellies, muttonchops out to here, banging on about the glory of foreign wars and the sanctity of the marriage bed? Frankly, I wanted to slit my own throat.”

Peripherally, I see the other students smile. I don’t.

“Never in my wildest dreams,” he continues, looking out into the room, “did I expect to find in the work of the Victorians such despair. Lust. Terror.” He makes eye contact with a different person at each word, a politician “connecting” with his audience. “Wisdom. Love.”

And bam. His eyes lock with mine and there’s a whisper of hesitation in his voice, like the momentary skip of an old record. No one else notices. But I do. And he does. He quickly looks back out to the group. “Do you believe me?” he asks.

Not on your life, I think.

He claps his hands. “Any questions, then? Before we start?”

I raise my hand.

“We don’t raise hands here. Forty lashes and no grog for you.” He smiles at me. The gall.

“Do you have a syllabus we can look at?” I ask, sure he doesn’t.

“A syllabus?”

There’s a titter somewhere in the class. He cocks his head at me. “Yes,” I continue. “A document in which you outline the weekly reading, due dates, grading standards, expectations?”

“Ah, good question,” he says easily. “You don’t need to prepare any of the material ahead of time, and I don’t foresee any papers, but if we do have one it’ll be set at your convenience, and lastly, I’m not responsible for marking. So …”

By the snickers from some of the other students I glean that this is common knowledge. I look down at the table, realizing that I might be on the verge of embarrassing myself. “Okay. No syllabus is an Oxfordian thing that I’ll just have to get used to.”

A voice pipes up across from me. “Oxonian, actually.”

I glance over. A girl who looks like an English rose cameo you’d find on an antique pin scribbles something in her notebook, not looking at me.

“Tomato, to-mah-to,” I reply, with forced geniality.

“It’s not a matter of pronunciation, of dialectology,” she counters in a low, luxuriant voice. She keeps writing. “It’s not a linguistic schism from the colonies, it’s quite simply and literally a different word.”

My face heats. “Oh yeah?”

She deigns to look up. “‘Oxfordian’ refers to the theory purporting that the seventeenth Earl of Oxford authored the works of Shakespeare. A theory that has fallen predominantly out of favor amongst most legitimate academics.”

The way she says “legitimate academics” feels like a slap. “Okay, cool,” I say. “Thanks for the tip.”

She smiles tightly and looks back down at her notebook. I bury my face in mine as well. If I could disappear right now I would.

“All right, then, Oxonians,” Jamie Davenport says buoyantly, “Onward!”

EVERYONE IN THE class is obviously smart. The pink-haired girl next to me hasn’t said anything, but has at least ten pages of notes. Charlie, who never even pulled out a notebook, rattles off crisp and cogent comments with about as much effort as a yawn. And the English Rose drops her observations quietly yet deliberately, with perfectly chosen words and no extraneous “uhs” or “likes” or “you knows.” How is that possible?

I haven’t said anything.

I wasn’t an English major in undergrad. I was, perhaps unsurprisingly, poli sci and history. I took English classes for fun, and am well read, but I didn’t live, breathe, and eat it the way these people did. They are here, doing a master of studies in English at Oxford University, because they earned it.

I basically won a contest.

No disrespect to the Rhodes, but it’s true. I got the scholarship because of the overall applicant I was, not because the committee knew I would excel in the study of English literature and language, 1830–1914. How could they know I’d be good at this? They were all hedge-fund execs and mathematics professors and social entrepreneurs.

What am I doing here?

A thought runs screaming through my mind like an escapee from an insane asylum: if I had actually applied to Oxford, I probably wouldn’t be here.

Somehow this fact never occurred to me until just now while someone says, “Yes, but as Stanley Fish would have us believe,” and another person says, “Harold Bloom would disagree with you there,” and another replies, “Well, Bloom,” as if that’s retort enough, and then there are just words: “Derrida” and “Said” and “New Historicism” and “Queer Theory” and everything is “Post” (Post-Modernism, Post-Feminism, Post-Christian), until I honestly don’t know what we’re talking about anymore.

I realize that as much as I’d like to get out of this class and ask Styan about other options, I have no right to. The political operative from Ohio thinks the posh prat of a TA is beneath her? Because the truth is, all my anger, embarrassment, and hurt pride aside, I have to admit he’s giving a damn fine lecture. He hasn’t looked at his notes once. He’s fielded questions with ease, moderated discussion with finesse, and managed with tact to tell certain people, “That’s an interesting point, but have you evidence?” when he obviously means, “That’s stupid, shut up.”

Jamie Davenport comes around to the front of the podium, nodding along to whatever English Rose is saying. “Right, Cecelia, exactly. There’s a theory that Shakespeare’s plays taught us how to be human, how to understand ourselves. I believe that poetry teaches us how to feel.” He looks out to the rest of the group, and says:

“My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;